The memories of my childhood were scorched with violence, obscured by smoke and a parade of family catastrophe. First, the terrible news of the Trebbia river, where my uncle, penned against the icy water on a slate-grey December morning, was cut down along with thousands of others. Then, the disaster at Lake Trasimene, when the army forged to end the war blundered into an ambush, the enemy charging them along the foggy banks of the sinister black water and inflicting a terrible slaughter in the shallows. My older cousin, just seventeen, trying to swim free of the massacre, drowned in his armour. His body was never recovered, and his soul still wanders the mists of that haunted place. The cataclysm at Lake Trasimene, so close to our home town of Arretium, touched nearly every family in our small community. And a year later, at Cannae, in a period of new optimism with the gods pacified by offerings and with the largest force ever assembled and keyed to a feverish state of readiness, the world ended. My father, Tiberius, a centurion in the Twentieth legion, laid down his life for the Republic. Not one member of his vaunted unit survived their encounter with the Carthaginian army and their terrible leader—a man whose energy and powers permeated every aspect of our lives. Hannibal. The name still stings many years later, with the future of the Republic safeguarded by our mastery of the Mediterranean.
My name is Marcus Tiberius Varus, and I am a survivor. I—we, the Roman commonwealth—survived Hannibal. And this is our story.
It was late summer in that terrible period after the calamity at Cannae. Dazed by the heat, stunned by the defeat, we waited with a terrible anxiety for Hannibal’s endgame, a move that would surely bring about the downfall of our nation. Cicadas sang drowsily under a sultry, shimmering blanket that hung over a withered and blackened landscape. Heavy fighting the year before had killed many of our livestock and inflicted extensive damage to the crops on which we relied for our subsistence. The coming harvest would be a meagre one. With no body to place in the family tomb on the quiet road lined with pine trees that led away from the southern gate of Arretium, those of us who remained in the town assembled to remember my father.
On the same day, even as we mourned, the messenger arrived.
I hurried to hear what this new herald had to say. Just before I reached the town square, I met with two old friends from nearby farmsteads, Mattias and Crispus. We had grown up together, played in the haystacks together, chased girls together. I remember clearly that at such a terrible time there was still a genuine warmth between us, as if our friendship could hold at bay whatever the future might hold.
‘Hello, Marcus’, Mattias greeted me, thumping my back in welcome. He searched beyond me and added, with a crooked smile, ‘by the gods, if it isn’t you, you runt!’
I looked around for Crispus, who sheepishly acknowledged his friend’s insult. Turning back to Mattias, I pinched his sleeve disapprovingly.
‘Look at you’, I said. ‘They have been working you to the bone, it seems.’
‘Ah, there is much to be done on the farm, even with so few animals to tend; I am the only man left, and little enough food to keep us all going’, Mattias conceded wearily, his tunic hanging loosely off muscle and bone and all trace of his childlike chubbiness gone.
‘And you, Crispus’, I said, as Mattias pulled him into a tight hug that elicited a yelp, ‘still sweet on Cottia, are you?’
Crispus, who barely came up to Mattias’ shoulders, groaned; his heroically futile crush on my younger sister had somehow been sustained for several years, even as all the while Cottia remained determinedly oblivious to his efforts.
‘So what will be it be, lads?’ Mattias said with an expressionless face, breaking the levity. He motioned towards the town square and we fell in beside him. ‘I have asked a few of the old timers’—by this he meant survivors of the first war against Carthage, too old to fight in this new venture—‘and they reckon they know all too well what this messenger is about.’
Mattias pushed his way through the growing crowd and into the square itself, until we reached the front of the throng where a man climbed up onto the platform in the centre, used by heralds and others to call out all manner of information from the price of bread to declarations of war. A breeze carried with it the smell of leather, sweat, and the oil that protected armour from rust. Even now, an old man, I well remember the officer’s appearance, for he seemed to be an emissary from a different world—a place where hope was still possible and meat could be placed on the family table. His skin was youthful under a polished helmet of burnished silver, chased with fine images drawn from our myths and legends. A curved sword hung by his side in a leather scabbard decorated with images of battle, impressed into the cow-hide by a fine needlework that surely cost many days’ work. I could not imagine such wealth. He looked around at us, holding in his hands the power to ordain our fates.
‘Men of Arretium’, he began. Some amongst the crowd snorted.
‘What men?’ came the shout. ‘There are only boys and the living dead left here now!’
The messenger held up a hand, and there was a grudging silence, broken only by the low moan of the wind.
‘Hannibal must be brought to bay! The conscript fathers in the senate have not forgotten their sacred duty. And you must not forget yours! It is now your turn to serve your nation. Men, soon you will be called upon to enter service, for our people need you…’
The officer’s speech was intended to instill patriotic fervor, but its confidence was belied by the uncertainty that gripped the nation and fed our nervous trepidation. I must confess that even while the image of the officer remains firmly in my mind, I remember little of what he actually said. All that seemed important at the time was the summons: names were spoken, including ours, and with that our fates were settled as easily as check marks on a waxed writing tablet. I glanced at Crispus; a shocked but resigned look had come across his gentle face. Mattias was expressionless as the messenger continued.
‘One night, men: you will reassemble here tomorrow, by the noon hour. May the gods be with you.’ And then he was gone in a rustling of armour, his scarlet cloak leaving a storm of dust and dead leaves.
Later, as the sun swept to the horizon and the air began to cool, we walked together, Mattias, Crispus, and I. An oppressive silence hung over us, like the hour before a storm in late summer. Eventually, I broke it.
‘What will you do?’ I said.
Crispus let out a sigh, and then smiled weakly. ‘Spend the evening with mama, I suppose.’ He stopped suddenly, looking at his feet, dusty in their open sandals and calloused from farm work.
‘What is it?’ I asked. A look of despair had come over my friend’s face.
‘We–we must survive, we have to’, Crispus stammered with a mixture of misery and determination. ‘We are all that is left for our families…without us they, and the land, our land, our way of life, will not continue.’ And he was right; my father was gone, and both Mattias’ and Crispus’ fathers had died long ago in one of Rome’s endless and forgotten border wars, and there were no other menfolk to tend to the farms.
Crispus stifled the choking noise in his throat and looked at me with a sudden resolve I had rarely seen in my gawkish, slightly awkward friend of many years.
‘And we must look after each other, so that we all come back from wherever they send us.’
Mattias and I nodded in agreement. ‘Remember the first war’, Mattias said, ‘whole villages joined the legions, fought together, and came back together.’
‘Or died together’, Crispus reminded us miserably, continuing to wrestle with his emotions. ‘Nearly every man from Ariminum died at sea, or have you forgotten?’
He looked away, embarrassed at his loss of composure, and Mattias and I exchanged a worried glance. We all remembered the desolation of the legionary transports from Ariminum in a deadly storm, even before the armoured men carried in their bowels had the chance to fight the hated enemy. Whole platoons sank in deep water with not a chance to swim to shore.
‘Enough of this,’ I said firmly. Mattias nodded, and, after a brief moment, Crispus followed. ‘We are going to come back. All of us. And before that, we are going to honour our families by not showing an ounce of weakness in front of our mothers, our sisters, our families.’ Touching my chest, I went on: ‘No matter how terrified we feel inside…we owe our fathers that much—we must take their place and honour their service.’
‘Now then’, Mattias added, ‘let us go home.’
We parted at the vale that lay just below a narrow stand of cypress trees, perched on a low ridge. My farm lay just beyond, and as my two friends headed off to the east to their own families, we agreed to meet back at the same place, an hour after dawn, for our return to Arretium.
At the farm, I finished some last chores that my family needed: a fence mended, the chicken coop repaired. These were the tasks that my father had long done, until he went to war, never to return. As I worked, my thoughts coalesced around my memories of him, about how he handled his own summons to the fight. My father believed in Rome in a way which I occasionally found difficult to understand; here was a man never to be overly active in the local magistracies, but he possessed a keen interest in government and an unwavering belief in its ability to protect us. In that, I understood many years later, he was no different from the average Roman citizen. Our government, he liked to remind me, was our strength.
‘You see, Marcus’, he had once said, stroking his beard and settling into his favourite chair, and a cup of wine cradled within two huge hands, ‘without the consuls, elected each year, we would have no leaders. Without the senate, nobody to make sure those leaders performed their duties. And without the people, nobody to make sure that both consuls and senate are doing their jobs for the people. It’s a remarkable system, the best in the world.
‘Other nations have kings, who claim descent from the gods, like that fool Alexander.’ He snorted derisively. ‘I hear the Greeks call him ‘The Great’! What is so Great about him?’
I shook my head, although we all knew about the great king Alexander, who conquered the known world when he was but a young man.
‘Dead at 33!’, my father snorted, lifting his cup of wine and draining it. ‘Didn’t even leave an heir, and his kingdom fell to pieces. What sort of way is that to manage the affairs of the people?’
I had nodded dutifully, refilling his cup from a ceramic flask on the table nearby.
‘When war comes’, he had continued, ‘and it comes every year, along with the taxes and the harvest—our government is the best protection we could want. The legions, my boy, well—no better fighting force. But without the consuls to lead them and the senate to guide them, and the people to provide the moral fibre for the soldiers and the consuls on the battlefield, our legions would be nothing more than a rabble. Our consuls, senate, and people will outlast any upstart king, no matter what god he claims to have on his side. And as long as our government stands, nobody can beat us. Remember that, my boy, and everything else will follow.’
‘Dinner is ready, Marcus’, my mother, Tiberia, called. I stirred from my recollections of my father and came into the house from the kitchen garden, the scent of crushed herbs and baked loaves hanging in the air over the hearth.
I looked over at the food she was arranging on the kitchen table. ‘I have prepared just a simple evening meal of bread, wine, and cheese’, my mother said. ‘There isn’t much else, I’m afraid. I will wait for your return to make your favourite dish’, she added sadly.
‘Thank you, mother. I will hold you to your promise’, I said. ‘I have loved everything you have ever made for us, but the cheesecakes with bay—’, and I paused theatrically, my eyes closed, in an attempt to lighten the sombre mood. Opening them, I could see that it had worked, and mother wore a semblance of a smile on her worn and lined face. She had seen too many of the town’s men go to war and never return, but she never complained about the years of waiting without news, relying on rumours, gossip, and the detached condolences provided by government messengers—all that had lain on her shoulders since my father and her own brother were first old enough to fight.
‘This is my latest effort’, she said, indicating a fresh round of goat’s cheese on the table, drizzling it with the oil pressed from our neighbour’s olive grove and scattering it with parsley that I had brought in from outside. She smoothed the scarf that covered her hair, even on so hot a day, and brushed the flour from her woolen tunic.
‘I’ll miss your cheese, mother’, I said, wrapping her in a gentle embrace, before sitting down and picking up the plate.
‘And I will miss you, Marcus.’ I looked around, and saw my sister, Cottia, standing in the doorway. She walked over and kissed me gently on the cheek, and then leaned towards me and embraced me tightly, her hair falling around my face and over my eyes.
‘You little sneak!’ I yelped as Cottia, having distracted me, pinched the cheese plate.
‘I will eat your share of the cheese, brother, so be sure to come back before I find myself too plump on our mother’s cooking.’
‘You know your skills are the talk of the town, mother’, I said, and then I looked at her and Cottia, and pushed back the sadness that welled in my chest and threatened to engulf us all.
‘You are the most important people in my life’, I said simply. My mother nodded, and for a moment her composure wavered under the new and suffocating burden that she now carried.
‘Bring honour to our family, Marcus,’ she said, her strength returning. ‘Serve the nation well. Do your best to come back alive. If you are to die, then die well. Those are your mother’s orders.’
‘And they are mine’, Cottia added, her eyes moist and the colour of honey, her black hair hanging in rivulets over her shoulders.
‘And they would also have been the commands of your father’, my mother added, glancing at the shrine of the lares, the family gods. ‘When he left for the war he knew that his fate was in the hands of Mars, whose drumbeat guided and protected him. He never lost his resolve during his training and led his men well, that I know. When Mars decided it was his time, he was ready and did not shrink from his duty. You will honour his memory.’
A solemn moment passed between us. We held hands in silence, until Cottia pulled hers away and rubbed her cheeks, her eyes glistening with tears.
‘I will do what is right, mother, Cottia—that I promise.’
My mother nodded, and then the moment passed. ‘Enough of such things. Let us eat this meal together, as a family.’
We ate, and we laughed. It was a good evening, one whose memory I would cling to in the years ahead. Little did any of us know at the time that it would be a decade before I came back to Arretium, greatly changed by a brutal and hellish war.
Not long after dawn, I sat in silence before the lares, pondering this new chapter in my life. The house was quiet, and my bag was packed. I spent some time in contemplation before offering a brief prayer.
Father, may I live up to your example.
And then I stood up, slung my pack over my shoulder, and quickly left the house, pulling the door closed softly behind me.
I met with Mattias and Crispus in the vale below the cypress-lined ridge. We embraced, and boosted our spirits by sharing stories of our evenings as we walked.
‘By the gods, that cheese’, I said, drawing out the memory of the soft, tangy ball that we had eaten with murmurs of pleasure and admiration, mopping up the oil it was drizzled with using the last of the day’s bread my mother had baked.
‘Tiberia always knew what she was doing with the goats’, Mattias said wickedly, with a straight face.
‘You bastard!’ I laughed, punching him. ‘And you, Crispus?’ I said.
‘Mama and I had a quiet dinner with Valeria and Excubitor’, he replied. I winced with counterfeit pain.
‘You still keep that mutt, even after all that he did?’
‘Especially after all that he did’, Crispus responded. Only Crispus, I thought, would name a dog ‘bodyguard’ after it had taken a chunk of my calf muscle the past summer.
‘He’ll watch over all of our farms while we are gone.’
‘Thank you, friend’, Mattias said, ‘my mother will appreciate it, especially with us gone for the army.’
‘About the army’, I broke in. ‘They’ll probably take this, so let’s have it while we can.’ I broke open my satchel and pulled out three balls of cheese. Mattias reached over greedily.
‘Cottia said one of these was for you’, I told Crispus, who opened his mouth to say something before he saw the look on my face.
‘Bastard!’ he replied, but he was smiling. And with that, our bellies full of the best food that Arretium had to offer, we went to war.